Sep. 25, 2012

The dust jacket cover of "White Lama" by Douglas Veenhof, who will be in Reno this weekend for a workshop and next week for a book signing.

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Author Douglas Veenhof, who will be in Reno this weekend for a workshop and next week for a book signing. / Publicity image

Douglas Veenhof, a Buddhist journalist and author of Bernard’s biography “White Lama: The Life of Tantric Yogi Theos Bernard, Tibet’s Lost Emissary to the New World” will be in town this weekend for a lecture and series of meditation classes as well as a book signing Oct. 3 at Sundance Books and Music. The Friday, Sept. 28 speech, entitled “The Biggest Spiritual Question of Them All: How Do You Turn Concepts into Realizations?” is at 6:30 p.m. at Diamond Heart Center, 606 W. Plumb Lane. Donations are welcome. There will be two days of meditation courses also at Diamond Heart Saturday and Sunday at noon and 3:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25 per session. The book reading and signing is at 6:30 p.m. next Wednesday at Sundance Books and Music, 121 California Ave. Details at www.aci-reno.org and www.sundancebookstore.com.

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On March 21, 1939, members of a Reno audience paid 50 cents apiece to see a curious figure step onstage inside the State Building to deliver a lecture with the exotic title “Penthouse of the Gods.”

The man speaking was Theos Bernard, and underneath his easy-on-the-eyes Hollywood looks and charming speaking voice was a man dedicated to studying and teaching the ancient traditions of Tibet to American audiences.

Bernard, born and raised in Tombstone, Ariz., had given up a law practice to travel to the far east to learn about the then-unknown practices of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. With Tibet sealed off to foreigners, it remained one of the world’s last unknown places. Bernard, ever charming, managed to befriend the Tibetans and was eventually invited to study in their country. Upon his departure, he brought back 50 muleloads of ancient scrolls and priceless artifacts, given to him by Tibetan monks in order to spread the word about Tibetan Buddhism and yoga.

At his peak, Bernard enjoyed superstar status and was on the cover of Family Circle magazine. His travels were covered by the New York Times and London’s Daily Mail, resulting in front-page articles. At a time when yogis were viewed with suspicion, Bernard broke down barriers and infused new philosophies into the western world.

Then, in 1947, at the age of 38, Bernard’s voice was silenced when he was killed in sectarian violence in Tibet, but his legacy as the man who introduced Tibetan Buddhism to the west carries on to this day.

Douglas Veenhof, a Buddhist journalist and author of Bernard’s biography “White Lama: The Life of Tantric Yogi Theos Bernard, Tibet’s Lost Emissary to the New World” will be in town this weekend for a lecture and series of meditation classes as well as a book signing Oct. 3 at Sundance Books and Music.

The Friday night speech, entitled “The Biggest Spiritual Question of Them All: How Do You Turn Concepts into Realizations?” is at 6:30 p.m. at Diamond Heart Center, 606 W. Plumb Lane. Donations are welcome. There will be two days of meditation courses also at Diamond Heart Saturday and Sunday at noon and 3:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25 per session. The reading and signing is at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3 at Sundance Books and Music, 121 California Ave. In an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Veenhof talked about Bernard’s lasting influence, saying, “today there are 16 million people doing some form of yoga in the United States and 18 million in North America. There are 1,500 Tibetan Buddhist centers in the U.S., North America and Europe. 75 years ago, there was virtually nothing here.”

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Veenhof says a direct line can be drawn from Bernard’s teachings and today’s widespread popularity of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism.

The complete Q&A follows below.

Q: Let’s start with the talk you’ll be giving Friday night. What sort of ground will you cover?

A: Theos Bernard went to Tibet with a question. He was the first real researcher in the west making an academic study as an anthropologist and a philosopher of Tantric yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. He went with the question, “do these ancient spiritual technologies have any relevance for the modern world?”

The Friday talk will address this question. The Three-Step Dance of Turning Concept into Realization. It relies on new discoveries in neuorscience and how the world of our experience really depends on whether it’s the left or the right hemisphere of the brain that is paying attention to the world. The really fascinating premise in this neuroscience is that the 21st Century World of Modernism and Post-Modernism is simultaneously the product of a radical imbalance of these two hemispheres. My premise is that these 2,500 year old practices of meditation and yoga are probably the best methods ever devised to bring that third step of the three-step back into play and rebalance the hemispheres.

Q: This calls to mind the famous Harvard study where Buddhist monks were hooked up to EEGs to look at their brain activity when they were meditating.

A: There’s evidence all over the place now. A lot of it deals with mindful attention, like John Kabat Zinn’s approach to mindfulness and stress reduction. Also, Stanford has undertaken a whole new series of research dealing specifically with advanced meditators and Tibetan monks and how this development of compassion affects the brain, and the health aspects of it. There’s a huge amount of research now answering that question that Theos went to Tibet to answer for himself.

Over the weekend, we’ll be getting into the real nuts and bolts of this 2,500-year-old system of meditation called Shamatha meditation. It’s the method of really establishing stability, clarity and vividness in meditation; a way of placing the mind where you would like to and developing the ability to keep it there. This is based on techniques derived from three different Buddhist schools of meditation.

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Q: With four different meditation sessions, people can just drop in on any one of them?

A: They can drop in and hopefully they will come to the first one and decide to come to all of the others also because it is a progression. Definitely anybody coming to the third session will regret that they didn’t come to the first session.

Q: Can people of all experience levels come?

A: That’s right. The reason a beginning meditator would want to come here is we’re going to be getting into really experiential methods for laying the foundation for good meditation practice. These are things I wish I had learned 25 years ago. People who have been meditating for 25 years or so are also excited about these techniques because it’s a blending of techniques. It’s a very interesting and enlivening approach that works very well for meditators that have plateaued.

Q: Before we get into Theos, tell me about your background and how you came to these studies.

A: I’ve had a lifelong interest really since age 18 when I went to college and in my study of poetry at St. Olaf College (in Minnesota), I became really enamored with Carl Jung during my study of the Beats. When I was 18 I found on the remainder table of a bookstore a reproduction of the 1935 edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and that book had a forward by Carl Jung. That started me on a long fascination with Tibetan Buddhism.

Q: Interesting. I stumbled on Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha” around the same age, which got me interested.

A: It was Herman Hesse that also was part of my interest in Jung, especially (the 1919 novel) “Demian.” All of that fit together for the same way it did for you. Interestingly, this whole idea in the introduction to the book that Jung credits his own idea of Shadow Projection, which is a very important topic in humanistic psychology, to the Tibetan Book of the Dead for giving him that idea that he introduced in analytical psychology to the west.

After college, I moved out to Washington state and became obsessed with climbing and glaciers and I worked as a professional mountain guide for seven years. I had a group of private clients that would take me traveling and frequently to the Himalayas, where I’d spend six months to a year. When I went there, I spent more and more time in the monasteries there. That really began to intrigue me. In 1987, I was there leading a trip to Lhasa in Tibet for the 40th anniversary of Mao’s Communist victory in China. That was a very sensitive period in Lhasa because the Chinese wanted to make a celebration of it and the Tibetans wanted to protest. I was witness to a demonstration and its brutal crackdown in which seven Tibetans were killed. So for 20 years already at that point, I had been a writer working on poetry, a novel and a screenplay. I thought that I had the story of this very powerful international event, which I was one of the first people to get out of Tibet a week later and get to Kathmandu because Tibet was locked down in martial law. I realized I didn’t know anything at all about news reporting and I hadn’t reported the story. So, all I had was my first-person, subjective account of events. What I realized I wanted to really be able to do that sort of thing, so I went back to the University of Washington and got a degree in journalism.

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Q: Theos was certainly a very interesting character. How do we draw a direct line between Theos and the modern Buddhist and yogic movements in the west today?

A: Today there are 16 million people doing some form of yoga in the United States and 18 million in North America. There are 1,500 Tibetan Buddhist centers in the U.S., North America and Europe. 75 years ago, there was virtually nothing here. Through unique circumstances, this boy growing up in Tombstone, Ariz., became fascinated with yoga and tanrta. He undertook the first academic study in the United States of tantra.

At that time, yoga and Tibetan Buddhism were really known only for their caricatures in the mainstream media. Zen was getting a real foothold here, but Tibetan Buddhism and yoga both were thought of as depraved, cultish, deity-worshiping, demon-filled paths. Most of the knowledge that we had of those came from missionaries to Tibet. Tibet, for Victorian adventurers, was the last great unsolved problem. The source of the Nile had been found, but Tibet, since 1792, had been sealed off. It was a romantic destination for adventurers and explorers. Tibet was “the last place.”

Theos was the first one invited in as a spiritual pilgrim because of his preparation. He spoke fluent Tibetan and spent six months learning the culture. He was an anthropologist, so he was really trying to understand this culture, so he was treated like royalty when he spent his three months in Tibet and sent back with 50 muleloads of the finest quality scriptures and priceless artifacts. He was the first one to come back with a story.

In the fall of 1937, just when Theos was returning to Tibet, Frank Capra was just releasing “Lost Horizon,” which had been an international bestseller. Theos then became the poster child for someone who actually did go to Tibet and came back with the truth of “Lost Horizon” and the wisdom that was going to save the world.

In my account of the “Lost Horizon” mania, there’s a 1939 advertisement from the Reno Evening Gazette because Theos went to Reno that read something like, “Have you seen ‘Lost Horizon?’ Then come hear Theos Bernard tell you the real story of Shangri-La.”

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There are a couple of Reno episodes in the book. After the law was changed in Nevada legalizing divorcing, Viola, Theo’s first wife, spent a month in Reno gaining residency.

Theos became a cultural phemonenon because of that cultural interest in Tibet. It was the powerful, forbidden, romantic and last great destination for the world to explore. Also, in 1937, the country and the world felt like it was the darkest moment in history. That was the zeitgeist. In fact, it was James Hilton, author of “Lost Horizon” who called it that in a piece in the L.A. Times. It seemed the United States was about to be dragged into another European war, and technology had created the instruments of destruction that could completely annihilate all of human culture. That was heavy on the minds of people. The storyline of “Lost Horizon” is that that’s exactly what happens. So the news events and “Lost Horizon” fit together so perfectly with Theos’ return from Tibet and bringing this ancient wisdom that had a power that people were hoping would bring peace to the world.

Q: So, the world was really sort of primed for him. Was he well received at first?

A: He became such a huge celebrity. Within six months of his return, he had two book contracts and his editor was Maxwell Perkins at Scribners who was famous for discovering Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. His picture appeared on the cover of Family Circle, the leading personality magazine of the day four times in 18 months. It had a circulation of 3.5 million. He shared those four covers with people like Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and Dorothy Lamour, and his picture was twice the size of theirs.

He went on a speaking tour to capitalize on his celebrity and to spread the story of Tibetan Buddhism and yoga. He toured the country and crossed the country four times, stopping in major cities, including Reno.

The London Daily Mail gave him a front page story and called it the greatest adventure story of the year when he returned.

Q: Why are we so interested in Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism here in the west?

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A: I can tell you why I became fascinated. On my visits to the Himalayas and spending time in Tibetan culture, I was always fascinated why people who had so little could be so happy. I think that’s what really intrigues westerners. The Dalai Lama is just the poster child for someone who is well-adapted and seems to just live and breath genuine, sustainable happiness. I think that really intrigues people who are unhappy. The thing you always hear is that, “I don’t know what they have, but I want some of that.”

Q: Right, like “how do you bottle that?” Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our approach is that we look at happiness as something to be possessed.

A: Yeah. But that’s always the proof of a philosophy; the success of those who are practicing it. I believe that’s what leads people to show up for yoga for the first time or to show up for a meditation class, is that they’ve met someone for whom it seems to be working.

Q: Are these practices good for those of us in the west as they are, or do they need a little bit of modification, culturally, to get it?

A: How is Buddhism being introduced to the west, because it’s a one-generation old phenomenon? A number of things are happening. You still see the absolutely pure lineage that the absolute masters in Tibet 200 years ago would have been using the same monastic textbooks and doing the exact same practices. And then, at the same time, there’s a group of Buddhists that are changing it, I think very dramatically and to a point that we need to see whether this new approach still has the power of the proven, old approach. The basic idea of whether the phenomenon of consciousness can be reduced to the brain. So, is the mind nothing but the neurological correlates that can be measured in the laboratory? If you believe, as materialist, reductionists do who say that the mind ends at death, that changes the scope of practices and the goal of practices.